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Homelessness

Once-homeless University of Chicago law grad getting treatment, hopes to return to law practice

By Debra Cassens Weiss

March 19, 2025, 12:41 pm CDT

A University of Chicago Law School graduate who lived for two years on the streets of Los Angeles has moved back home with his mother in Virginia and hopes to resume law practice.

Rob Dart moved home in January and has been taking anti-psychotic medication for more than three months, the Wall Street Journal reports. He is taking online continuing legal education classes and hopes to regain his law license.

The Wall Street Journal had chronicled efforts by Dart’s family to help him in articles published this month and in May 2024. He began hearing voices when he was 35 years old and returned to his mother’s home at that time. He received medication and therapy for two years but quit treatment in 2022 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dart ended up homeless in Los Angeles. His sister and mother had traveled to California to try to help him, but he often rejected them.

The Wall Street Journal’s coverage spurred some people to offer help. One reader set up a tab for Dart at a coffee shop. Another connected Dart’s family with a psychiatrist affiliated with a Pasadena, California, hospital who said he would treat Dart when he was willing to accept help.

Late last year, Dart began treatment at the hospital. But during the wildfires in Los Angeles earlier this year, Dart successfully petitioned for release. Days later, he agreed to return to his mother’s home and began treatment.

Online records indicate that Dart was admitted to law practice in Illinois in 2004 and in California in 2009. He was suspended in California for failure to meet state CLE requirements in 2022 and for failure to pay fees in 2023. He also failed to show compliance with Illinois CLE requirements and was last registered there in 2022.

Dart’s last registered address with Illinois attorney regulators was at the Wilshire Law Firm in Los Angeles.

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3. Florida lawyer says she used trust account…

Ethics

Florida lawyer says she used trust account funds to avoid becoming homeless

By Debra Cassens Weiss

October 17, 2024, 1:58 pm CDT

An Orlando, Florida, lawyer accused of client trust account violations has said she used some settlement funds during the COVID-19 pandemic to avoid becoming homeless when she lost her primary job as a schoolteacher.

The Florida Supreme Court placed the lawyer, Natalie Renee Jones of Florida, on emergency suspension in a Sept. 16 order summarized by the Florida Bar News.

The Miami Herald covered the suspension and Jones’ explanation.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton are further compounding Jones’ troubles, Jones said in a motion for an extension of time to comply with the suspension order. The hurricanes have displaced Jones from her home and law office, and she has limited access to essential documents and records, she said.

The ethics investigation began when Bank of America notified the Florida Bar of an overdraft of about $2,400 in Jones’ client trust account in March, according to the Sept. 11 motion for the emergency suspension. The bar determined that the overdraft stemmed from Jones’ payment of fees to herself from trust account money two weeks before she deposited the settlement check.

The bar initiated an audit. It found shortages in the trust account ranging from $3,333 to $37,052 from December 2020 to June 2024, according to the suspension petition.

Jones told disciplinary authorities in a June letter that she used client settlement funds for personal expenses because “the alternative would have rendered my son and me homeless.”

The letter said Jones began working as a schoolteacher a year before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. She also began drafting demand letters for attorneys and took on two significant accident cases against Walmart and Lyft, as well as some smaller cases.

After the pandemic shut down schools and courts, Jones wrote, “I was without a steady income and in an exceptionally precarious situation.” Because her “finances were depleted,” she had to refer her two best cases to large litigation law firms.

When smaller cases settled, she said, she did not immediately compensate medical providers and used the money for living expenses.

In her answer to the petition for an emergency suspension, Jones said there was no threat to the public because all clients received their full settlement funds. Medical providers impacted by delayed funds were contacted and informed.

Jones said she is an attorney with a 30-year career that is “devoid of bar violations or complaints.”

Since the bar inquiry began, Jones said, she has taken a continuing legal education course on emotional resiliency, has sought counseling, and has listened to podcasts on managing client trust accounts.

Neither Jones nor her lawyer, Christopher L. Clark of the First Neighborhood Law Firm, immediately responded to an ABA Journal request for comment sent to email addresses used in the disciplinary case.